A little more than a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the green light as F1's latest entry for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has required a frenetic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the race track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now at over 400 and planned to reach the objective of 600 rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the program across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
