Just over twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the green light as Formula One’s most recent entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the looming critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and planned to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
