A little more than twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the official approval as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by minds are more focused on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the race track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now at over 400 and intended to reach the target of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on various components of the mission across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager consults a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
