Just over a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the official approval as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Constructing the squad from scratch has involved a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling various components of the mission at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader talks to a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The success of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
