Approximately one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the official approval as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from nothing has required a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the America, with approximately 100 days 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 never-ending challenge, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and has a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are sharper on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now up to more than 400 and planned to attain the objective of 600 rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager talks to a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
