Approximately one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest participant for 2026. Constructing the organization from the ground up has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You might get a short period looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the race track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the process of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the program in a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader consults a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this nimble approach will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
