A little more than twelve months previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has involved a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the season to be held in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“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,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the target of six hundred quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the process of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on various components of the program at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader talks to a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
