A little more than twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the green light as F1's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has required a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a short period looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Chester shared this view he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there 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 advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now up to over 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred quickly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, different from the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the project at a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor consults a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
