Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entrant for 2026. Constructing the squad from scratch has involved a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be held in the America, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that passes thoughts are more focused on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the team are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
