A little more than a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the season to be held in the US, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes thoughts are more focused on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of 600 quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, 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 assortment of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the program across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader talks to a leader in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
