Just over one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and gets a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of completing an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on various components of the project across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble approach will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
