Just over twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as F1's newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from scratch has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while Chester echoed this he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now at over 400 and planned to hit the goal of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the center to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know 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 adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling different aspects of the program in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
