A little more than a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to change team culture.”
With each day that passes minds are sharper on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender doing the proper actions on the track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to more than 400 and planned to reach the target of 600 rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that leader talks to a manager in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta