A little more than one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the official approval as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from scratch has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while the CTO shared this view he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with staff now at more than 400 and intended to attain the target of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling different aspects of the mission at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that manager consults a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
