Approximately a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has required a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the ride.
“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by minds are sharper on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at more than 400 and planned to attain the goal of 600 rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the program in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile approach will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
