Approximately twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and has a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an grand prix 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 don’t get the possibility to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to reach the goal of 600 quickly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of finishing 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 developing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that manager consults a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for each action is much smoother and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
