Just over one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from nothing has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be staged in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and has a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you won't have the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the impending moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In August they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to over 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, at odds with the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the program in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that leader talks to a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
