A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the official approval as F1's newest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from scratch has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and intended to hit the target of six hundred quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling various components of the project across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that leader talks to a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
