Approximately a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest entry for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has required a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a wry smile when considering the journey.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are more focused on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on various components of the mission across a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader talks to a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
