A little more than a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the green light as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to change team culture.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the race track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now reaching over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all working on distinct elements of the project across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a manager in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
