Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has entailed a intense work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we won't be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the project in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that leader consults a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
