A little more than one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the go-ahead as F1's newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a wry smile when considering the journey.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that passes focus are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in full swing, with staff now up to more than 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred quickly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the center to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that leader talks to a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
