Approximately a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as F1's latest entrant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a amused expression when considering the ride.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view with this structure, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the process of building an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the mission across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that leader talks to a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble approach will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
