A little more than one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be staged in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the chance to alter team culture.”
With each day that passes minds are more focused on the impending decisive point in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Chester echoed this he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and planned to reach the goal of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the power unit, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the project across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
