Just over a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from the ground up has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“There might be a short period looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the chance to alter team culture.”
With every day that elapses focus are sharper on the looming critical moment in Australia and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the project at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
