A little more than twelve months previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the official approval as F1's newest entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the America, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses minds are sharper on the approaching decisive point in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this setup, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now reaching more than 400 and planned to reach the goal of six hundred quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the project at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The success of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
