Approximately one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's newest entry for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that passes thoughts are more focused on the looming decisive point in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of 600 quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the power unit, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
