A little more than twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's newest participant for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“There might be a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses focus are sharper on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with employees now reaching more than 400 and intended to hit the objective of 600 members quickly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the project at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager consults a leader in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower people to take charge. Eliminating management approval for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
