Just over a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign 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 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With every day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the circuit. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and intended to attain the goal of 600 rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to build the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the mission in a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The success of this agile strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
