A little more than a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the green light as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has involved a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be held in the America, with approximately 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a amused expression when considering the ride.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester shared this view he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez 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, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 quickly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the process of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to build the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on various components of the project in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
