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Approximately twelve months previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the go-ahead as F1's newest entry for the 2026 season. Building the organization from scratch has required a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.

The Tight Timeline to Australia

At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the America, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.

“You might get a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”

A Unique Challenge

The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you won't have the chance to transform organizational mindset.”

With each passing day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.

“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.

“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Push

In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to hit the goal of 600 members quickly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the team are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the center to build the power unit, set for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.

Space Mission Model

“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”

So they have implemented, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission at a multiple sites.

“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and more rapid.”

The Future

The success of this nimble methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta