Approximately a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as F1's latest entrant for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the America, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to change cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by minds are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of six hundred quickly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the phase of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, different from the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the program in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
