Approximately twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the go-ahead as F1's most recent entry for 2026. Constructing the team from nothing has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the season to be staged in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that passes minds are more focused on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now at in excess of 400 and intended to attain the objective of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the team are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling various components of the program in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor consults a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower staff to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
