Approximately twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has involved a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when considering the journey.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to produce the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager consults a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
