Just over one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has involved a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the season to be held in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are more focused on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the race track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated the team principal shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the mission in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this agile methodology will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
