Approximately twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the official approval as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when considering the journey.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, 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 chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the looming critical moment in Australia and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at over 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, contrary to the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all working on distinct elements of the project at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that leader communicates with a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Avoiding management approval for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
