Approximately a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the go-ahead as F1's most recent entry for 2026. Establishing the squad from scratch has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you won't have the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, 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 achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with employees now at in excess of 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, contrary to the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the mission at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
