Approximately twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for 2026. Constructing the team from nothing has entailed a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO had success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now reaching over 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
Space Mission Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the mission in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that manager consults a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
