Approximately a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the go-ahead as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be held in the US, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are sharper on the impending critical moment in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and planned to attain the objective of 600 members quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the program in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader consults a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
