Just over a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's most recent entry for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by focus are sharper on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now at more than 400 and scheduled to attain the target of 600 swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, 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 akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission in a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that manager communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this nimble strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
