Approximately one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Establishing the organization from the ground up has required a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be staged in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change cultural approach.”
With each day that passes thoughts are more focused on the approaching critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad 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 operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now up to over 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader talks to a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
