Approximately twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as F1's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from the ground up has required a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the track. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with personnel now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, 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 traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on various components of the mission across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor consults a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
