Just over a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the official approval as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender doing the proper actions on the track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 members quickly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of completing an main base at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on various components of the mission at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager consults a leader in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
