A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as F1's latest participant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.
“There might be a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has truly matched the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix 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 won't have the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each day that goes by minds are more focused on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at in excess of 400 and planned to reach the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the project across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a manager in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
