A little more than one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are sharper on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender doing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, different from the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal shortly before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the project across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor consults a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The success of this flexible methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
