Approximately twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be held in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time 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 enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center since then and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the ride.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are sharper on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated recently and while Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to 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, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now at more than 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated the team principal ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the project in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this nimble 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 taken on as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
