Approximately twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from scratch has required a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the America, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in March 2023 not long 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 thinking about the ride.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Chester echoed this he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching over 400 and planned to reach the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the center to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal just before the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the mission in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a manager in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
