Approximately twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has entailed a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be held in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while the CTO shared this view he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the new engine, set for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on distinct elements of the mission in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this nimble methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
