Just over one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and has a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you won't have the opportunity to change team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now at more than 400 and planned to attain the target of 600 members quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the mission in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their manager, that manager talks to a manager at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta