A little more than twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the official approval as Formula One’s newest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from scratch has required a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes thoughts are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this setup, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now up to over 400 and intended to hit the objective of 600 quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the center to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the mission across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor consults a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
