Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the official approval as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the US, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, 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 opportunity to change team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile methodology will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
