Approximately a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you won't have the chance to change team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are sharper on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 members quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the mission across a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
