Approximately a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as Formula One’s newest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from scratch has required a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the America, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes focus are sharper on the approaching decisive point in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of completing an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the program in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that leader consults a manager in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
