Just over a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the green light as F1's latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from scratch has required a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses minds are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the race track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now up to more than 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the program at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
