A little more than a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a hectic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the US, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a amused expression when considering the experience.
“There might be a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes focus are sharper on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on various components of the project at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
