Just over twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from scratch has involved a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the America, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the chance to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are sharper on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, different from the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the project in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their manager, that manager communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
