Just over a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has involved a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the season to be held in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the ride.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a huge amount 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 believe with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to over 400 and intended to hit the target of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the mission in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a manager at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
