A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from nothing has involved a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be staged in the US, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, 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 opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now reaching over 400 and planned to reach the target of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on various components of the mission across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that supervisor consults a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
