Just over one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has involved a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are sharper on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the race track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching over 400 and intended to reach the objective of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of completing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on various components of the project at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager consults a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for everything is much smoother and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
