A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from scratch has involved a hectic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the US, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“There might be a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 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 existing team you won't have the opportunity to change team culture.”
With each day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the track. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the mission at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
