A little more than one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the go-ahead as F1's newest participant for 2026. Establishing the organization from scratch has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the impending moment of truth in Australia and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at over 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the program in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader consults a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this nimble methodology will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
