Just over twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while the CTO shared this view he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now up to more than 400 and intended to attain the target of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Moving away from management approval for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile approach will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
