Approximately a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the green light as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of 2005 and 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 task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to alter cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the race track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to over 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 members quickly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all working on various components of the program at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
