Just over one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from nothing has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be held in the America, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and enjoys a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses minds are sharper on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and intended to hit the target of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of building an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging 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, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the program in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
