Approximately a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest participant for 2026. Establishing the squad from nothing has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the United States, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, 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 opportunity to transform team culture.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at more than 400 and planned to attain the target of 600 rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, different from the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the program at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that leader communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The success of this flexible methodology will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
