A little more than one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the official approval as F1's newest entry for 2026. Establishing the team from nothing has entailed a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to transform team culture.”
With each day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In August they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and intended to reach the target of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the process of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the center to produce the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling different aspects of the program at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that manager talks to a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
