A little more than one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Constructing the squad from scratch has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be held in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching over 400 and planned to reach the objective of six hundred quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the project across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
