Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the green light as Formula One’s most recent entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has involved a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be staged in the America, with approximately 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and has a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of 2005 and 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 challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you won't have the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now up to more than 400 and planned to reach the target of 600 quickly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the power unit, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the program in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
