🔗 Share this article

Approximately one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the official approval as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has involved a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.

The Tight Timeline to Melbourne

At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and gets a amused expression when considering the experience.

“You can have a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”

An Unprecedented Task

Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to alter team culture.”

With every day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being handled.

“You have to assume that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.

“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”

Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort

In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “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. In my view with this structure, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred quickly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the team are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.

Space Mission Model

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the project across a multiple sites.

“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta