A little more than a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and has a wry smile when considering the journey.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while Chester shared this view he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the circuit. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of completing an main base at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to build the new engine, set for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
