Just over a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from scratch has required a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be held in the America, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the race track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor consults a manager in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
