Just over one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent participant for 2026. Establishing the squad from scratch has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the United States, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 rapidly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on various components of the mission across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that leader consults a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
