A little more than a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as F1's most recent entry for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has entailed a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and has a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that passes focus are sharper on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO shared this view he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now up to over 400 and intended to hit the objective of six hundred quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to manufacture the power unit, set for the 2029 season – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta