Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent participant for 2026. Establishing the squad from the ground up has involved a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and gets a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO shared this view he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the track. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the power unit, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the project at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
