A little more than a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has involved a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the season to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to transform team culture.”
With each day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with staff now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of 600 quickly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to produce the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on various components of the mission across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that manager consults a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action 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 considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
