Just over twelve months previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as F1's newest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be held in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by focus are sharper on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the trend in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that manager consults a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
