Just over a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as F1's latest participant for 2026. Constructing the squad from nothing has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be held in the America, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the track. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now at in excess of 400 and intended to hit the target of 600 members quickly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager talks to a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower team members to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
