A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the America, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes thoughts are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with staff now reaching over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 quickly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the mission at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a manager in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
