A little more than twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the go-ahead as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Establishing the organization from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the season to be held in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and has a wry smile when considering the journey.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender executing the proper actions on the track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now up to over 400 and planned to reach the goal of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the program in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
