A little more than a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the official approval as F1's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has required a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be held in the America, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“There might be a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO had success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In August they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now at more than 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling various components of the program at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
