A little more than one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in full swing, with staff now at over 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. OK, 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 flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the program across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor talks to a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
