Approximately a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest entry for the 2026 season. Building the organization from scratch has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the US, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are sharper on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO shared this view he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal just before the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, 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 comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all working on various components of the project across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
