A little more than twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the green light as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be staged in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they hit the circuit 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 challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing 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 transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are more focused on the impending moment of truth in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the program in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader consults a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
