A little more than twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entry for 2026. Building the team from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“You might get a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the race track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have 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. In my view with this setup, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that leader communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The success of this agile methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
