Just over twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the official approval as F1's latest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to hit the target of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal just before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the project in a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Eliminating management approval for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The success of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
