A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the green light as Formula One’s most recent participant for 2026. Constructing the organization from the ground up has involved a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and has a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Australia and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the race track. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and planned to attain the objective of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, contrary to the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the program across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager talks to a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Moving away from management approval for each action is much smoother and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this nimble strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
