Approximately a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the go-ahead as F1's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and has a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With every day that elapses minds are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of completing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on different aspects of the project in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that leader consults a leader at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
