A little more than a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as the world of Formula One's latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this setup, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now at over 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said the team principal shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, 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 similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all working on different aspects of the program across a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
