A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the go-ahead as F1's newest participant for 2026. Building the organization from the ground up has involved a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Australia and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now at over 400 and planned to hit the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the center to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the program at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor consults a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
