A little more than one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Building the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be held in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Chester echoed this he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now at over 400 and planned to hit the goal of 600 swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to produce the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the project in a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that manager talks to a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
