Approximately twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent participant for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be staged in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and has a amused expression when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now at over 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to produce the new engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the project at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that leader consults a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
