Just over a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as F1's latest entry for 2026. Building the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the season to be staged in the America, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 members quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon just before the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
