A little more than a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the official approval as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from scratch has required a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be staged in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each day that goes by minds are more focused on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to build the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, 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 akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the program across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that leader talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
