Just over twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the official approval as F1's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from nothing has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team 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 final race of the championship to be held in the US, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the impending moment of truth in Australia and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Chester shared this view he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the race track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with employees now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the process of building an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the center to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the project in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that leader talks to a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
