Just over twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has required a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be held in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while Chester shared this view he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with employees now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to attain the target of 600 members quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the process of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to build the power unit, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all working on different aspects of the project across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader talks to a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Avoiding management approval for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
