Just over one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the official approval as Formula One’s latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With each day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to attain the objective of 600 rapidly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of completing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the direction in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling various components of the project in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that leader consults a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
