Just over one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the go-ahead as F1's latest participant for 2026. Building the squad from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and has a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now reaching more than 400 and planned to hit the target of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on various components of the project across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
