Approximately a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with employees now at more than 400 and intended to attain the goal of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the process of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, contrary to the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
