Approximately a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has required a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“You might get a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are sharper on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now at in excess of 400 and planned to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling various components of the mission in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
