Just over one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the attitude of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and planned to reach the objective of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, contrary to the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the project across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
