A little more than a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the green light as F1's latest participant for 2026. Constructing the squad from scratch has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO had success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to change team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender executing the proper actions on the race track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching over 400 and intended to hit the objective of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, 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 Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all working on various components of the project in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta