Just over a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the green light as F1's latest entry for 2026. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be held in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and has a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind 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 no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of building an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the mission at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
