Approximately one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the go-ahead as F1's newest participant for 2026. Constructing the organization from the ground up has required a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With every day that passes thoughts are sharper on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Chester echoed this he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the race track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with employees now at in excess of 400 and planned to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
