Approximately one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for 2026. Establishing the team from scratch has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the America, with approximately 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 never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that passes thoughts are more focused on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 quickly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the power unit, set for the 2029 season – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the program across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager talks to a manager in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
