A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the official approval as F1's newest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and has a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to reach the objective of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of building an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the center to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, contrary to the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the program in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a protocol where an issue arises and they raise it up to their manager, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
