Approximately twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entry for 2026. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are more focused on the looming decisive point 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 feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and we expect most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now at over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 members quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a manager in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
