Just over one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the go-ahead as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from scratch has required a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the United States, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”
With each day that passes thoughts are more focused on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently 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 belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and planned to reach the target of six hundred quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” stated the team principal just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on various components of the program at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that manager talks to a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
