Approximately twelve months previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Establishing the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center since then and has a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes focus are more focused on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and planned to attain the goal of six hundred quickly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated the team principal shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the project in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader talks to a supervisor in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
