A little more than one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as F1's newest entry for 2026. Establishing the organization from nothing has involved a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are more focused on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated the team principal just before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the program across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that leader communicates with a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
