Just over one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Building the organization from the ground up has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the US, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and has a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the process of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the program in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that manager consults a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this flexible methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta