Just over twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as F1's latest participant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the America, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a wry smile when considering the journey.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘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 consider: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes thoughts are sharper on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while Chester shared this view he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at more than 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the project in a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a manager in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
