Approximately a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the official approval as F1's most recent entry for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has required a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You might get a short period looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Australia and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now at more than 400 and intended to hit the target of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organization, contrary to the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all working on various components of the mission in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
