Just over twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the green light as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the America, with approximately 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 advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and has a wry smile when considering the journey.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that elapses minds are sharper on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the track. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, contrary to the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on various components of the mission in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that leader talks to a manager at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
