Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the go-ahead as F1's latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has required a intense work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With each day that elapses focus are sharper on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected 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's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with employees now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the project across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager consults a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
