A little more than twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest participant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from nothing has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and gets a wry smile when considering the ride.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious seasons of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor consults a leader in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
