Just over a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from scratch has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be held in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are sharper on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with employees now up to more than 400 and intended to reach the goal of 600 swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
