Just over a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the America, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by minds are sharper on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while the CTO shared this view he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender executing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at over 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the process of building an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all working on different aspects of the project at a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
