Approximately one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest participant for 2026. Establishing the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the ride.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said the team principal shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
