Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has required a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the correct procedures on the track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. 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 can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal just before the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling various components of the project at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The success of this nimble approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
