A little more than a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the go-ahead as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from scratch has involved a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport 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 staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO shared this view he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender doing the proper actions on the race track. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the mission at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
