Just over a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the America, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”
With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now at more than 400 and intended to attain the goal of 600 members quickly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the power unit, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated the team principal shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all working on various components of the mission across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Avoiding management approval for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
