Just over a full 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 most recent entry for 2026. Building the team from scratch has entailed a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be held in the US, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the race track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view with this structure, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in full swing, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor consults a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
