A little more than one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from scratch has required a frenetic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the US, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the looming moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the track. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of six hundred quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to build the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling various components of the mission in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a manager in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
