A little more than twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for 2026. Building the squad from the ground up has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the proper actions on the race track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view with this structure, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with staff now at in excess of 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said the team principal just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the program at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
