Approximately twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from nothing has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne 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 sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”
With each day that elapses minds are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now up to more than 400 and intended to reach the target of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, contrary to the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on various components of the project in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that leader communicates with a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
