A little more than one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as F1's latest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race 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 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 monumental task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“There might be a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to change cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at over 400 and intended to reach the target of 600 quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on distinct elements of the mission in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
