Approximately one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the official approval as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from the ground up has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be held in the US, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and has a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to change team culture.”
With every day that elapses minds are sharper on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the new engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the mission in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that supervisor consults a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
