Just over a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s newest participant for 2026. Establishing the team from scratch has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be held in the US, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the chance to alter team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 swiftly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, contrary to the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that manager communicates with a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
