Just over one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the United States, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while the CTO shared this view he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to reach the target of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the project in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that manager consults a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Avoiding management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
