A little more than twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entry for 2026. Building the team from nothing has required a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you won't have the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming 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 agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the track. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now up to over 400 and planned to attain the target of 600 members quickly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the power unit, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the mission in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
