Approximately one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Building the squad from the ground up has required a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the America, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and has a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to change team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are more focused on the looming decisive point in Australia and goals are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the target of 600 swiftly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the team are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the project at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager talks to a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
