Approximately twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from scratch has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are sharper on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender doing the right things on the race track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and intended to attain the goal of 600 members quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the program across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that leader communicates with a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower people to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
