🔗 Share this article

Just over twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the green light as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from nothing has required a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and has a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.

“You can have five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Challenge

The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.

“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to change cultural approach.”

With every day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the team had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender doing the right things on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”

Racing Talent and Hiring Effort

In August they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”

To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to reach the target of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.

Space Mission Model

“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the project across a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”

Upcoming Challenges

The success of this agile strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta