A little more than one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the United States, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that passes focus are sharper on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at in excess of 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all working on distinct elements of the program across a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
