A little more than one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the America, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has truly matched the task of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the race track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to attain the target of six hundred quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the process of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
