A little more than twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from nothing has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and has a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a reputation to build 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 operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to more than 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the center to produce the power unit, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging 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 embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that manager talks to a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is much smoother and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
