Approximately a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has entailed a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be held in the America, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an grand prix team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With every day that passes minds are sharper on the impending moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the program in a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
