🔗 Share this article

A little more than twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's newest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the final race of the season to be staged in the America, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.

“You can have five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”

A Unique Challenge

The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to transform team culture.”

With each passing day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.

“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the team had a point to prove as well.

“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression after that.”

Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort

In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. 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 that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now up to more than 400 and intended to attain the objective of 600 quickly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.

Space Mission Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the project in a multiple sites.

“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”

The Future

The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta