Approximately one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be held in the US, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when considering the journey.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the race track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at more than 400 and planned to hit the target of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the program across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader consults a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
