A little more than twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be held in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and has a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Chester echoed this he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the race track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 swiftly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the mission across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their manager, that manager consults a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
