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Just over a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Constructing the organization from scratch has entailed a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.

“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

A Unique Opportunity

Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the owner, GM, into Formula One.

“Building an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you won't have the chance to alter organizational mindset.”

With every day that elapses minds are sharper on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.

“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the race track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”

Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push

In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”

To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the power unit, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.

NASA Inspiration

“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”

So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the project across a variety of locations.

“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that leader consults a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower people to take charge. Eliminating management approval for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”

The Future

The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta