Just over twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas 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 involved a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the program at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor talks to a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta