A little more than one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from nothing has required a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, 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 not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that passes minds are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to more than 400 and planned to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the mission across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
