A little more than twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are sharper on the impending decisive point in Australia and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the circuit. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now reaching more than 400 and intended to reach the target of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the program across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that leader consults a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
