Just over twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the go-ahead as F1's newest entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from scratch has involved a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One 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 each day that goes by focus are more focused on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now up to more than 400 and planned to attain the target of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that leader consults a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
