Cadillac F1 Adopts NASA’s Apollo Mission Strategy for 2026 Debut

As the Cadillac F1 team gears up for its 2026 Formula One debut, team principal Graeme Lowdon has revealed that the outfit has been relying on a management model based on NASA’s Apollo project to manage its operations from multiple locations in the UK and the USA.

With around six months to go before the second American F1 team enters the grid, Cadillac is on course to get two cars ready after making significant investments in manpower and infrastructure.

While the team has already developed a 2026 car concept for crash testing and aerodynamic testing, Lowdon emphasized the need for an efficient management structure for easy and quick “peer-to-peer interaction” across multiple locations.

As a result, the team adopted a flat management model, inspired by the one NASA used for its Apollo mission. Speaking to the media in Silverstone, Lowdon explained:

“It’s very similar. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.

“If you look at the task in hand, we’ve got immovable deadlines. We’ve got a massive necessity for peer-to-peer interaction.

“So we need engineers talking to engineers. We need an engineer here [in Silverstone] talking to an engineer in Charlotte [North Carolina] and another one in Warren, Michigan, or eventually in Fishers [Indiana, where Cadillac U.S. racing headquarters is being constructed]. And so we’ve looked to have a very, very flat management structure.

“We’ve leaned heavily on the management structures that were used for the Apollo project. It’s super interesting and I don’t know if other teams have used that before.

“You always look around to get inspiration from how other people have tackled things. And I just thought that there was some good learnings from that.

“Is it the equivalent of putting a man on the moon? I don’t know about that. But what strikes me is it’s quite a difficult task.”

Lowdon added that compared to a pyramid structure that several teams run on, a flat management structure is best suited for a multi-site team like Cadillac. He said:

“So race teams are often described in military terms where, even if you see a garage tour, someone will say, this is organised in a kind of pyramid, and you have one person at the top. And the typical military structure is command and control. So you issue commands, people do things.

“When it’s a multi-site team like this, that becomes a massive challenge. And what you can’t have is an engineer here [in Silverstone] having to go up and down a particular hierarchy and then hop across, in our instance, not just to a different geographic location, but a different country altogether, and then go up and down.

“So instead, it’s a kind of a different structure where it’s mission control instead of command and control. So you have this really flat structure. Engineers are able to talk directly to each other. And the thing that’s heavily imparted on them is the mission itself. Everyone knows what the mission is. They know what needs to be done.

“So far it works. You know, the proof of the pudding is going to be in whether the car’s quick.”