Approximately a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the America, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we won't be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now at over 400 and intended to reach the goal of 600 rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the trend in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the program in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
