A little more than a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has involved a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit 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 sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to change team culture.”
With each day that passes minds are sharper on the impending decisive point in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “In order that we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to attain the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester referred to.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said the team principal just before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the program across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a leader in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
