A little more than one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the United States, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the possibility to alter team culture.”
With every day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the race track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to reach the goal of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the mission at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
