Just over twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the green light as F1's newest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 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 knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“There might be a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes focus are sharper on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on different aspects of the mission at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader talks to a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Moving away from management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
