Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Vegas this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the US, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the chance to alter team culture.”
With every day that elapses focus are sharper on the impending moment of truth in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the circuit. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the program in a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager consults a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
