Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the green light as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from scratch has involved a intense work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the US, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are more focused on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred quickly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the center to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, different from the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the mission in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
