Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entry for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has entailed a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know 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 three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume 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 this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the project across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Avoiding management approval for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
