🔗 Share this article

A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has involved a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.

The Countdown to Australia

At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a knowing grin when considering the ride.

“You can have five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.

“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”

With each day that passes minds are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being set realistically.

“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Chester shared this view he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.

“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”

Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push

In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.

“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”

To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and intended to hit the objective of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.

Space Mission Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for everything is much smoother and faster.”

What Lies Ahead

The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta