Just over twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race 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 Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With each day that passes minds are more focused on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO shared this view he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender executing the proper actions on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to more than 400 and planned to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of building an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate structure, different from the direction in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
