A little more than one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the green light as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has involved a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign 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 first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while Chester echoed this he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on various components of the project across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible strategy will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
