Just over a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the green light as Formula One’s latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now up to over 400 and intended to attain the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling various components of the project in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
