Approximately twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by focus are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the program at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
