Just over a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the season to be staged in the US, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each day that passes focus are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the mood of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on distinct elements of the program at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible approach will be tested in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
