Approximately one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the official approval as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Constructing the team from nothing has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the America, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now up to over 400 and planned to attain the target of six hundred quickly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of building an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the center to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the program in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager consults a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
