Just over twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the official approval as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from scratch has entailed a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the circuit. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, 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 adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the mission in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that leader talks to a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
