Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as F1's newest participant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has entailed a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored 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?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 swiftly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the team are in the phase of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the program at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that manager communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
