A little more than one 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 latest participant for 2026. Establishing the team from nothing has required a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be held in the US, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “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 finish last. In my view with this structure, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with staff now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 members quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the mission in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
