A little more than one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from nothing has involved a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an F1 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 existing team you don’t get the chance to alter team culture.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now at more than 400 and intended to attain the target of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the center to manufacture the new engine, set for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling various components of the project across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
