Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the go-ahead as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has entailed a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the US, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in Australia and targets are being handled.
“One must presume 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,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the track. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at in excess of 400 and intended to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the program across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader consults a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
