Just over one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as F1's most recent entry for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has required a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the season to be held in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and has a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the chance to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes thoughts are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the race track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching more than 400 and intended to hit the objective of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
