A little more than a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as Formula One’s latest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and gets a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the looming decisive point in Australia and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now at more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 rapidly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the direction in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the program in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
