A little more than a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team sponsored by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the chance to change cultural approach.”
With every day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender executing the proper actions on the track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of six hundred quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the project across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that manager consults a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The success of this agile strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
