Just over one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the official approval as F1's newest entrant for 2026. Establishing the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the US, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the possibility to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the team 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 seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now at in excess of 400 and intended to attain the goal of 600 swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the center to manufacture the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the trend in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the project across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that manager consults a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
