Approximately a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest participant for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has involved a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes minds are more focused on the looming decisive point in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and intended to hit the objective of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the team are in the phase of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex structure, contrary to the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the mission in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this agile methodology will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
