A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from the ground up has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes focus are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated recently and while the CTO shared this view he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and planned to attain the target of six hundred quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the new engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader consults a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The success of this nimble strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
