Just over a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a amused expression when considering the journey.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of finishing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the program at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
