A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the green light as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from scratch has entailed a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be held in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and has a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester 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,” he emphasizes. “In order that we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching over 400 and intended to hit the objective of 600 quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the center to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
