A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the official approval as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut 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 sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you won't have the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are sharper on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In August they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now at in excess of 400 and planned to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all working on distinct elements of the program in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that manager talks to a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
