A little more than twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the team from nothing has involved a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses minds are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the circuit. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to more than 400 and intended to hit the objective of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the mission at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
