A little more than one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as F1's newest participant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has entailed a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the America, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are sharper on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this setup, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with staff now at more than 400 and intended to attain the goal of 600 rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all working on different aspects of the mission at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a leader in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible 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 signed as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
