A little more than a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the green light as Formula One’s newest entry for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has entailed a intense work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Vegas this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the America, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and has a wry smile when considering the journey.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the race track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching over 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the center to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the program in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
