🔗 Share this article

Approximately one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has involved a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Australia

At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.

“You can have a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”

With every day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.

“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the proper actions on the track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push

In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”

To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now at over 400 and planned to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.

NASA Model

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all working on different aspects of the project in a multiple sites.

“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”

Upcoming Challenges

The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta