Just over one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you won't have the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling different aspects of the program at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
