Approximately twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the official approval as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be staged in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of 600 swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the mission across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that leader communicates with a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
