Just over twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from the ground up has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You might get a short period looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending decisive point in Australia and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and planned to reach the objective of six hundred quickly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to produce the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the trend in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader talks to a leader in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Eliminating management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
