A little more than twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for 2026. Constructing the organization from scratch has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the race track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “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’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching over 400 and planned to reach the target of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
