A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has entailed a hectic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and has a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, 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 chance to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Australia and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to build the new engine, set for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the program at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that manager consults a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
