Just over twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for 2026. Building the organization from the ground up has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the season to be staged in the America, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center since then and gets a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the task of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to change cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by minds are more focused on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with employees now reaching over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, contrary to the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the mission in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that leader talks to a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
