A little more than one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from scratch has entailed a hectic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious seasons of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each day that goes by focus are sharper on the looming critical moment in Australia and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the correct procedures on the race track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with employees now at in excess of 400 and intended to hit the goal of six hundred quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on different aspects of the project at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
