A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the official approval as F1's newest participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to over 400 and scheduled to attain the target of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the new engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the program at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
