A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the official approval as the world of Formula One's most recent entry for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has required a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the US, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a wry smile when considering the ride.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, 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. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of completing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the project in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that manager talks to a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The success of this agile approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
