Approximately one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as F1's newest entrant for 2026. Establishing the squad from the ground up has involved a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the America, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“There might be a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that passes focus are sharper on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now at in excess of 400 and planned to attain the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of completing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to produce the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal shortly before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the project at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager talks to a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
