Just over a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the official approval as F1's latest entry for 2026. Building the organization from the ground up has entailed a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be held in the America, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the possibility to alter team culture.”
With every day that elapses minds are more focused on the impending decisive point in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe with this setup, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now at over 400 and planned to reach the target of six hundred quickly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the project in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
