A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be held in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now at in excess of 400 and intended to attain the target of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all working on various components of the program across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The success of this agile approach will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
