Approximately a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the official approval as F1's latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the looming decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now at over 400 and planned to hit the goal of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the 2029 engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the trend in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
