A little more than a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entry for the 2026 season. Building the organization from scratch has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver 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 challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at over 400 and planned to attain the target of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the program across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for each action is much smoother and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
