A little more than a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has entailed a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient 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 approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending critical moment in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while the CTO shared this view he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now at in excess of 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said the team principal just before the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on various components of the program at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a leader in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
