Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from nothing has required a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task 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 stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now at over 400 and planned to hit the goal of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of building an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to build the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the project in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
