Just over a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as F1's newest participant for 2026. Building the organization from nothing has involved a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be held in the US, with around a hundred days 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 sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the circuit. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, 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 it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the center to manufacture the power unit, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
