Approximately a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has entailed a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You might get a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”
With each day that goes by focus are sharper on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and planned to reach the target of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon ahead of the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the program at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
