Just over a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent entry for 2026. Establishing the squad from scratch has required a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be held in the US, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a wry smile when considering the journey.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With every day that passes focus are more focused on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the race track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the project at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower team members to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble approach will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
