Approximately a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from scratch has entailed a frenetic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the United States, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With every day that elapses minds are more focused on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching more than 400 and intended to hit the objective of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the new engine, set for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, different from the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that manager consults a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this nimble methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
