Just over twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Establishing the team from nothing has involved a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and has a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the race track. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said the team principal just before the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling various components of the mission in a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
