A little more than a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has required a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each day that passes thoughts are more focused on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to hit the objective of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the process of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to build the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager talks to a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble strategy will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
