Approximately twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the go-ahead as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from scratch has required a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the season to be staged in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are sharper on the impending critical moment in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now up to over 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission in a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
