A little more than one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Constructing the organization from scratch has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the season to be held in the United States, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now at in excess of 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the new engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the project in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a manager in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
