Approximately a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Building the organization from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and planned to hit the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of finishing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the power unit, scheduled 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 movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the program in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
