Just over twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Building the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months 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 endeavor, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and has a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now up to more than 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on various components of the program in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
