Just over one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Constructing the team from nothing has required a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the season to be held in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by minds are more focused on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the circuit. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now at more than 400 and scheduled to attain the target of 600 rapidly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the process of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, contrary to the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the mission across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that manager consults a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
