Approximately a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes thoughts are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Chester shared this view he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now up to more than 400 and intended to attain the goal of 600 quickly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on different aspects of the project in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader consults a leader at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
