🔗 Share this article

A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the green light as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when reflecting on the ride.

“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity

Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.

“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”

With each day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.

“You have to assume that any new team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the race track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”

Racing Talent and Team Building Push

In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”

To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.

Apollo Model

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”

So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the program at a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”

Upcoming Challenges

The efficacy of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta