A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from scratch has entailed a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the season to be staged in the United States, 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 made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and gets a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“You might get a short period looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “In order that we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to reach the goal of 600 members quickly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the power unit, set for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on different aspects of the program at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor consults a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
