Approximately a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the green light as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Constructing the team from nothing has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each day that goes by focus are sharper on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to hit the goal of 600 rapidly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing 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 manager consults a manager in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
