A little more than one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from nothing has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and has a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while the CTO shared this view he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, different from the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling various components of the project in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager consults a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Eliminating management approval for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
