A little more than one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from nothing has required a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the mission at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
