A little more than a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has involved a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the chance to change team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses minds are more focused on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and targets 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 feat in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the circuit. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at in excess of 400 and planned to reach the goal of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are developing the center to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the project in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a manager in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
