A little more than a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the official approval as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has required a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the US, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when considering the ride.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each day that passes thoughts are sharper on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, contrary to the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the project at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that leader talks to a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
