A little more than one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as F1's latest participant for 2026. Constructing the organization from scratch has involved a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the America, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes minds are more focused on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect 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,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to produce the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the program in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
