A little more than twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Building the organization from the ground up has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be held in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that passes thoughts are more focused on the impending decisive point in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and planned to reach the goal of 600 swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the project across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that leader consults a supervisor in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
