Just over twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for 2026. Establishing the squad from scratch has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed 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 heart from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the target of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to produce the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the project across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
