A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has involved a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a amused expression when considering the ride.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.
“Building an grand prix team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now reaching over 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred quickly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to produce the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the mission at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to people to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
