Just over twelve months previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be held in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” 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 finish last. I believe with this setup, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with staff now reaching over 400 and intended to attain the objective of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager consults a manager in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower people to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The success of this nimble strategy will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
