Approximately twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the US, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to transform team culture.”
With each day that passes thoughts are more focused on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO shared this view he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we won't be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now at more than 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of completing an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the mission at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where an issue arises and they raise it up to their manager, that manager consults a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
