Just over twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from nothing has required a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and has a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO shared this view he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount 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 finish last. In my view with this structure, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to hit the target of six hundred quickly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
