Just over twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be held in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the race track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to reach the goal of 600 members quickly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, contrary to the trend in the sport for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission in a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager consults a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
