Approximately a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest entry for 2026. Establishing the organization from the ground up has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be held in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the chance to change cultural approach.”
With each day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume 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 commented this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal ahead of the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the program in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
