A little more than a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the green light as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip 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 US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to change cultural approach.”
With every day that passes focus are sharper on the looming moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume 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 achievement in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize 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, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
