Just over a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has entailed a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and has a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement 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 Task
The CTO had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to change team culture.”
With each day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now at in excess of 400 and planned to attain the goal of six hundred quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all working on distinct elements of the mission across a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that leader talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
