A little more than a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has required a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Vegas this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a amused expression when considering the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, 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 top gear, with employees now at more than 400 and intended to reach the goal of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the program at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
