A little more than twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the official approval as F1's most recent entry for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the US, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a amused expression when considering the journey.
“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by focus are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia 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 noted recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now at over 400 and intended to reach the target of 600 quickly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the process of completing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the project at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
