A little more than a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's most recent participant for 2026. Constructing the squad from scratch has entailed a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With every day that passes thoughts are more focused on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender doing the correct procedures on the track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling various components of the project across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that supervisor consults a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
