Approximately twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as F1's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has entailed a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of introducing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each day that elapses focus are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with staff now up to more than 400 and intended to reach the target of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the trend in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the mission across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
