A little more than one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the go-ahead as F1's latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from scratch has entailed a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be held in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, 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's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the race track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and intended to attain the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of completing an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager consults a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
