Just over twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Vegas this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the chance to alter team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are sharper on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the race track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now at over 400 and planned to reach the target of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, contrary to the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the program in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The success of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
