Approximately a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from scratch has involved a frenetic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the America, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes minds are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO shared this view he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to produce the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, contrary to the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the project across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager consults a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
