Just over one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You might get a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now at over 400 and intended to attain the target of 600 rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the mission at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
