Just over one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the official approval as F1's latest entry for 2026. Establishing the organization from nothing has required a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be staged in the US, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the looming moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Chester echoed this he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and planned to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the trend in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. 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 decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on various components of the program in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
