Just over twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the official approval as Formula One’s latest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work 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. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and planned to reach the target of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the team are in the process of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to build the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all working on different aspects of the project at a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager consults a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
