Approximately a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest participant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be held in the US, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender executing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are developing the center to build the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the program in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
