Just over one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as Formula One’s most recent entry for 2026. Establishing the team from scratch has required a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and intended to attain the objective of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate structure, different from the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all working on distinct elements of the mission across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor consults a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
