Just over a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from scratch has entailed a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with staff now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of six hundred quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the direction in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their manager, that leader consults a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this agile strategy will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
