🔗 Share this article

Approximately a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the official approval as Formula One’s newest entry for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the last event of the championship to be held in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.

“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.

“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”

With each day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that any new 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,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a statement to make as well.

“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”

Pilot Selection and Hiring Push

In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to build the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.

Space Mission Model

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon just before the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on various components of the program in a different facilities.

“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Eliminating management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”

Upcoming Challenges

The efficacy of this flexible approach will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta