Approximately one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has entailed a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the season to be staged in the United States, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and has a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are more focused on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the race track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with personnel now at more than 400 and planned to reach the target of six hundred quickly. Alongside their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of completing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the project in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader consults a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
