Just over one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has required a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the US, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and has a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending moment of truth in Australia and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the race track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with employees now at over 400 and intended to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the process of completing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that manager consults a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
