Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as F1's latest entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on Vegas this weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be held in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change cultural approach.”
With every day that passes focus are more focused on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to reach the objective of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, contrary to the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the mission across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager talks to a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
