Just over a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the official approval as Formula One’s newest participant for 2026. Building the team from nothing has involved a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be held in the America, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are sharper on the impending critical moment in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while Chester echoed this he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now reaching more than 400 and planned to reach the goal of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the team are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to produce the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, contrary to the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all working on different aspects of the project in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
