Approximately a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the official approval as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes thoughts are more focused on the looming decisive point in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO shared this view he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to reach the target of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the project across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
