Just over one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entrant for 2026. Establishing the organization from nothing has involved a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and planned to reach the objective of 600 quickly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on various components of the mission in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor consults a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
