A little more than one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the green light as F1's latest participant for 2026. Building the squad from the ground up has involved a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when considering the journey.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to reach the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the program in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a supervisor in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
