Just over a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as F1's latest entrant for 2026. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Drive
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the new engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the program at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader talks to a leader in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
