Approximately twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from scratch has required a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the season to be staged in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and has a wry smile when considering the journey.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by focus are sharper on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now reaching over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the center to manufacture the power unit, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
