A little more than a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as the world of Formula One's latest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from scratch has required a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the America, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses minds are sharper on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the race track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
