Approximately a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the official approval as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from nothing has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the impending moment of truth in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the circuit. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the center to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, 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 flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on various components of the program in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The success of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
