A little more than a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has involved a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be staged in the America, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and has a amused expression when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the chance to transform team culture.”
With each day that passes focus are more focused on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’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 employees now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all working on different aspects of the project across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
