A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest participant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from scratch has required a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be held in the US, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender doing the correct procedures on the track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this setup, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at over 400 and planned to reach the goal of six hundred quickly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of completing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, different from the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the mission across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a leader in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
