Approximately one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the United States, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each day that goes by focus are more focused on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with staff now up to more than 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said the team principal just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all tackling various components of the mission across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that manager consults a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
