Just over one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from scratch has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the chance to change cultural approach.”
With every day that passes thoughts are sharper on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. 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 can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and planned to attain the goal of 600 rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the center to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on different aspects of the program across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
