Just over twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the go-ahead as F1's newest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from scratch has entailed a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to change cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the circuit. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with staff now at in excess of 400 and intended to reach the goal of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of building an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are developing the center to build the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal just before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the program at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
