Approximately twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from nothing has entailed a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the chance to change cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with staff now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on various components of the project at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager consults a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
