Approximately a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from the ground up has required a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the America, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you won't have the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “In order that we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the mission across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
