A little more than one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has entailed a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be staged in the US, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester echoed this he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the circuit. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now at over 400 and planned to reach the objective of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of building an main base at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the trend in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on various components of the mission at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager communicates with a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower people to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
