A little more than twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as F1's newest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and has a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are sharper on the impending critical moment in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while the CTO echoed this he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now reaching over 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, contrary to the direction in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the mission across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for each action 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 the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
