Just over twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entry for 2026. Constructing the organization from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and has a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has truly matched the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by minds are sharper on the looming decisive point in Australia and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now at over 400 and planned to hit the objective of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on various components of the program at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble strategy will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
