Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has required a intense work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the United States, 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, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to hit the goal of 600 quickly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, at odds with the trend in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the mission at a variety of locations.
“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 in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “So we empower people to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
