Approximately one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the green light as Formula One’s most recent entry for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the season to be staged in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while Chester echoed this he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at in excess of 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 members quickly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the program at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager talks to a manager in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
