A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the official approval as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has entailed a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be held in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a short period looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while the CTO shared this view he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that we are a serious contender doing the right things on the track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In August they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of six hundred quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal just before the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling various components of the project across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager consults a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
