🔗 Share this article

A little more than twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as F1's newest participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has involved a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the final race of the season to be hosted in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.

“There might be a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”

A Unique Task

The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.

“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to alter team culture.”

With every day that elapses focus are more focused on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.

“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a statement to make as well.

“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”

Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive

In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and planned to reach the target of 600 quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.

NASA Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”

So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling various components of the project in a different facilities.

“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Moving away from management approval for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”

The Future

The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the young American Colton Herta