🔗 Share this article

Just over twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the official approval as Formula One’s latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from scratch has required a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.

The Tight Timeline to Melbourne

At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be adequate time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.

“You can have a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.

“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to change organizational mindset.”

With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.

“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Recruitment Drive

In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”

To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to attain the target of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the team are in the phase of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester referred to.

NASA Blueprint

“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”

So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling various components of the project at a variety of locations.

“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”

What Lies Ahead

The success of this agile methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta