Just over a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a amused expression when considering the journey.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the race track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and planned to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the new engine, set for 2029 – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal just before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, 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 usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
