A little more than a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as F1's newest participant for 2026. Establishing the squad from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be held in the America, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes thoughts are more focused on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the race track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and planned to reach the goal of 600 members quickly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the program across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower people to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
