A little more than one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the green light as the world of Formula One's newest participant for 2026. Establishing the organization from nothing has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be held in the US, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Australia and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at over 400 and planned to hit the goal of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to produce the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that leader communicates with a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower people to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble strategy will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
