A little more than one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you won't have the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Chester shared this view he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now at in excess of 400 and intended to hit the objective of 600 rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all working on various components of the program across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Avoiding management approval for each action is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
