Just over one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the green light as Formula One’s newest participant for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the center to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager consults a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
