Just over a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as F1's newest entry for 2026. Constructing the team from nothing has required a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Vegas this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the impending decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this setup, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the target of 600 quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of completing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, contrary to the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on various components of the mission across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a supervisor in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
