A little more than a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be held in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You might get a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are sharper on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with employees now at more than 400 and intended to attain the target of 600 rapidly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the project across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is much smoother and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
