A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest participant for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that passes minds are more focused on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching more than 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to build the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, contrary to the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the program in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this nimble strategy will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
