A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the official approval as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Constructing the organization from nothing has required a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the chance to change team culture.”
With each passing day that passes focus are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now at in excess of 400 and intended to reach the goal of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
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 assortment of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the project at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
