Approximately a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as the world of Formula One's latest participant for 2026. Building the team from nothing has involved a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the season to be held in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of combative 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 this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now up to over 400 and intended to attain the objective of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the new engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said the team principal just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on distinct elements of the project at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a manager in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
