A little more than a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the green light as F1's newest entrant for 2026. Building the organization from nothing has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the season to be held in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the challenge of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you won't have the possibility to change team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team 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 recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching over 400 and intended to attain the objective of 600 rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the center to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all working on different aspects of the program in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that manager consults a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The success of this flexible strategy will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
