Approximately a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the team from nothing has involved a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the US, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and has a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and planned to hit the goal of 600 rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, different from the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on various components of the project across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
