Approximately a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the official approval as F1's latest entrant for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has required a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the America, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you won't have the possibility to alter team culture.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated recently and while Chester echoed this he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the program at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that leader consults a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
