Just over a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as F1's latest entrant for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has required a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with just over three months to go before they make their debut 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 challenge, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, 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's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with employees now reaching more than 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the project at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that manager communicates with a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
