A little more than a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has involved a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are sharper on the impending critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester echoed this he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now at more than 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of building an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the new engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the program across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor consults a supervisor in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
