🔗 Share this article

A little more than a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Vegas this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the season finale of the championship to be held in the America, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.

“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”

A Unique Challenge

Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the parent company, GM, into F1.

“Building an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to alter team culture.”

With each day that passes thoughts are more focused on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.

“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.

“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement after that.”

Racing Talent and Hiring Push

In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of fighting spirit.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”

To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.

NASA Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”

So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the mission in a different facilities.

“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that leader talks to a manager at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”

What Lies Ahead

The efficacy of this agile methodology will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta