A little more than a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest entry for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 members quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
