A little more than a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from nothing has involved a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a wry smile when considering the ride.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to alter team culture.”
With every day that passes focus are sharper on the looming critical moment in Australia and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching over 400 and planned to attain the objective of 600 swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the center to build the power unit, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the project at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
