Approximately twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the go-ahead as F1's most recent entry for 2026. Establishing the squad from the ground up has required a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit 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 challenge, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a wry smile when considering the journey.
“There might be a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the looming decisive point in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of 600 quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the program across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager consults a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this agile approach will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
