A little more than twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the official approval as F1's latest entry for 2026. Building the organization from nothing has required a intense work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change cultural approach.”
With each day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “In order that we show up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on various components of the mission across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader consults a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
