Approximately a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has entailed a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the America, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of 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 heart since then and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses focus 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 just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently 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,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the race track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of six hundred rapidly. Alongside 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 developing the plant to produce the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated the team principal just before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the program across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader consults a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
