Just over twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from scratch has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the America, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses minds are more focused on the impending decisive point in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we won't be able 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 over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of six hundred quickly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to produce the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that supervisor consults a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile strategy will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
