A little more than twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from nothing has required a hectic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now at over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, set for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, contrary to the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the mission across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower people to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
