Just over one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the green light as F1's newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and has a amused expression when considering the experience.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that passes thoughts are sharper on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Chester echoed this he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the race track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In August they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to reach the target of 600 rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to build the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling various components of the mission in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
