Approximately a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the official approval as Formula One’s newest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has required a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia 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 challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each day that passes thoughts are sharper on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with staff now at over 400 and planned to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the process of building an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this nimble methodology will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
