Just over a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has entailed a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the US, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each passing day that passes focus are more focused on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with staff now reaching over 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of six hundred quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, different from the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on different aspects of the project at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that manager communicates with a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
