A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the green light as F1's newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be held in the US, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and gets a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are sharper on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching over 400 and planned to hit the goal of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
