Just over a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from scratch has required a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the mission in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that leader consults a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this agile methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
