A little more than twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the official approval as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the race track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now at in excess of 400 and intended to hit the target of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, contrary to the trend in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the mission at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta