Just over a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest participant for 2026. Establishing the organization from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
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 first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Australia and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching over 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
