A little more than one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the official approval as F1's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has required a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the race track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, 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 adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on various components of the project in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that leader talks to a manager in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Eliminating management approval for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
