A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Establishing the squad from nothing has entailed a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be held in the US, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a amused expression when considering the journey.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the task of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the process of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the center to build the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, 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 non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they escalate it to their manager, that manager communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this agile approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
