Just over a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the go-ahead as F1's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from nothing has involved a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the America, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses minds are more focused on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender doing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now reaching over 400 and intended to hit the objective of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the direction in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” stated the team principal just before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that leader talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this flexible methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
