A little more than twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the official approval as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be held in the US, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to more than 400 and intended to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the center to manufacture the power unit, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, different from the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all working on different aspects of the project at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
