A little more than a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the official approval as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has involved a frenetic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that passes focus are sharper on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with staff now up to more than 400 and planned to reach the target of 600 rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
