Just over one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the green light as Formula One’s newest entry for the 2026 season. Building the organization from scratch has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with employees now at more than 400 and intended to hit the target of 600 quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are developing the center to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the project across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The success of this flexible strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
