Approximately a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the green light as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has required a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the America, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation 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 ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each day that elapses minds are more focused on the impending decisive point in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now up to more than 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission across a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
