A little more than a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Constructing the squad from scratch has entailed a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are more focused on the looming decisive point in Australia and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now at over 400 and intended to attain the objective of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the program in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor consults a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible approach will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
