A little more than one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entry for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the America, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the chance to alter team culture.”
With each day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to attain the objective of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the process of completing an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager talks to a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “So we empower people to take charge. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The success of this flexible methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
