Approximately twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the official approval as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has entailed a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by focus are sharper on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching over 400 and intended to hit the target of six hundred quickly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said the team principal just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the project in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that supervisor consults a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
