A little more than a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be held in the United States, with around 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 never-ending task, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are more focused on the impending moment of truth 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 feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view with this structure, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to more than 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling various components of the project across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager consults a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be tested in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
