🔗 Share this article

Just over one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest entry for the 2026 season. Building the organization from scratch has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the final race of the season to be staged in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a amused expression when thinking about the journey.

“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.

“Building an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to alter team culture.”

With every day that goes by minds are sharper on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.

“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the team had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”

Racing Talent and Hiring Push

In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of combative optimism.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of 600 rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the new engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organization, at odds with the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.

Space Mission Inspiration

“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”

So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on various components of the project in a variety of locations.

“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader talks to a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”

The Future

The success of this nimble strategy will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta