Just over one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the green light as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the America, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now up to more than 400 and planned to hit the objective of six hundred quickly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’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 raise it up to their supervisor, that manager talks to a leader in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
