A little more than one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the green light as Formula One’s latest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the America, with around three months to go before they make their debut 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 challenge, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that passes focus are sharper on the looming critical moment in Australia and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now reaching more than 400 and planned to reach the goal of six hundred quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the program in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this nimble approach will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
