Just over one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the go-ahead as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from the ground up has required a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses focus are sharper on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while Chester echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and planned to attain the goal of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of completing an main base at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on various components of the project at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
