A little more than twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent entry for 2026. Building the squad from the ground up has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a short period looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you won't have the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the looming moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the race track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of 600 members quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal just before the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the mission across a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor consults a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The success of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
