A little more than twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the official approval as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale 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 Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart from that point and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you won't have the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by minds are sharper on the approaching decisive point in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the circuit. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a mountain 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 finish last. I am confident given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now up to over 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of 600 swiftly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of completing an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling various components of the mission at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that leader consults a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
