Approximately one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has involved a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be held in the America, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each day that elapses focus are sharper on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of building an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, different from the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal just before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the project in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader talks to a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
