🔗 Share this article

Approximately a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the America, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.

The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.

“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.

“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”

With each passing day that passes thoughts are sharper on the impending critical moment in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.

“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 noted recently and while Chester shared this view he thought the team had a statement to make as well.

“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show forward movement after that.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort

In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of fighting spirit.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, contrary to the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.

Apollo Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project at a different facilities.

“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”

The Future

The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta