A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has required a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a amused expression when considering the journey.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by minds are more focused on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume 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 feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In August they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now at over 400 and planned to reach the target of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the process of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the center to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on distinct elements of the program at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader consults a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
