Just over twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from nothing has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while the CTO shared this view he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now reaching more than 400 and planned to attain the goal of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the project across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a manager in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta