A little more than a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the green light as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the season to be held in the United States, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you won't have the possibility to transform team culture.”
With every day that elapses focus are more focused on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the track. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now at more than 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the project in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
