A little more than twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has required a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be held in the America, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, 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 wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to reach the goal of 600 members quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all working on distinct elements of the mission at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a leader at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
