A little more than one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the season to be held in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing 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 never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender doing the right things on the track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now at in excess of 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the phase of building an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the program in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that manager talks to a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
