A little more than twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's most recent participant for 2026. Building the squad from the ground up has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the season to be held in the US, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”
With every day that passes focus are sharper on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now up to over 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the mission across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager talks to a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Moving away from management approval for everything is much smoother and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
