Just over twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be held in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne 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 task, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now at more than 400 and intended to reach the goal of 600 members quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of completing an main base at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the program in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
