Approximately a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by minds are sharper on the looming critical moment in Australia and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while Chester echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at in excess of 400 and intended to attain the target of 600 members quickly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
