A little more than one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from the ground up has required a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be staged in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the possibility to change team culture.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the track. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a manager in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this flexible strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
