A little more than one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has involved a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the US, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Australia and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the race track. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, 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's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with employees now up to more than 400 and scheduled to attain the target of 600 quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, at odds with the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor consults a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
