Just over a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as F1's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has entailed a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be held in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With every day that passes focus are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Australia and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated recently and while Chester echoed this he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the race track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now at more than 400 and planned to attain the target of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated the team principal just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on various components of the project across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
