Just over a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in command 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 marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to alter team culture.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Drive
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said the team principal just before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the project across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
