A little more than twelve months previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the go-ahead as F1's newest entry for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has involved a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the US, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the task of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the process of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon ahead of the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the mission at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader consults a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this agile approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
