A little more than one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the official approval as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be held in the America, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the task of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the race track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe with this setup, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in full swing, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester referred to.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader talks to a manager in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
