A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the US, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the approaching critical moment in Australia and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now up to more than 400 and intended to hit the objective of six hundred quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on distinct elements of the project at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
