Just over twelve months previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the green light as Formula One’s most recent participant for 2026. Establishing the team from nothing has required a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia 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 enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center since then and has a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by focus are sharper on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the race track. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with staff now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on various components of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader consults a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The success of this agile methodology will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
