Approximately twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from scratch has involved a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now up to more than 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the program at a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
