Just over a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for 2026. Constructing the organization from the ground up has involved a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the organization 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 arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the target of six hundred quickly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this flexible strategy will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
