A little more than one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the official approval as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from nothing has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the race track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now reaching over 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the new engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the program in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
