Just over one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the green light as Formula One’s newest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has required a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the America, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With every day that elapses minds are sharper on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now at over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the center to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on various components of the program across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Avoiding management approval for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this flexible strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
