Just over twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With every day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana 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 the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the mission in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader consults a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
