A little more than twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Establishing the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline 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 first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with staff now reaching more than 400 and planned to attain the objective of 600 quickly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the program at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that manager communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Avoiding management approval for each action is much smoother and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
