A little more than twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“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,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and planned to attain the goal of six hundred quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Moving away from management approval for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this agile strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta