Just over a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entry for 2026. Constructing the team from nothing has required a intense work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the season to be staged in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and has a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each day that passes thoughts are sharper on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with employees now reaching over 400 and intended to reach the target of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the mission across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that leader talks to a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
