A little more than twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest participant for 2026. Building the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the America, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a amused expression when considering the ride.
“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of 600 swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon just before the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that manager communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
