Approximately one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from nothing has required a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be held in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the impending moment of truth in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at 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 in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on distinct elements of the program across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Avoiding management approval for each action is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
