A little more than a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the go-ahead as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from scratch has required a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, 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's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Chester echoed this he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with personnel now at over 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the program at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
