Approximately twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has required a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you won't have the possibility to change team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the track. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain 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 finish last. I believe given this organization, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to produce the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, contrary to the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager communicates with a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
