Just over twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's most recent participant for 2026. Establishing the team from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are sharper on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, different from the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all working on distinct elements of the mission in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
