A little more than one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the green light as the world of Formula One's newest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes minds are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of 600 quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the center to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the direction in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all working on distinct elements of the mission across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their manager, that leader talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
