A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the official approval as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the United States, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while Chester shared this view he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face 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 finish last. In my view with this setup, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now at more than 400 and intended to reach the target of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the project in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their manager, that manager communicates with a manager in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
