A little more than one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Constructing the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the season to be staged in the America, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut 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 challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses minds are sharper on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the race track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching more than 400 and intended to attain the goal of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the program in a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager consults a manager in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
