A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the green light as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has entailed a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the United States, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a wry smile when considering the journey.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With each day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender executing the proper actions on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at over 400 and intended to attain the target of six hundred quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex structure, at odds with the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on various components of the mission at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor consults a leader in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
