A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the chance to alter team culture.”
With each day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the project in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that manager consults a leader in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Moving away from management approval for each action is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble methodology will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
