A little more than a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as Formula One’s newest entrant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has entailed a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the America, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while Chester shared this view he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and intended to attain the target of six hundred quickly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the project in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor consults a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
