Approximately a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from scratch has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the US, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time 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 monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with staff now up to more than 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the center to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the mission across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager consults a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this nimble strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
