🔗 Share this article

Approximately one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the final race of the season to be hosted in the America, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne 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 enough hours in the day.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the ride.

“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Task

The CTO had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.

“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to alter team culture.”

With each day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the impending decisive point in Australia and expectations are being managed.

“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”

Racing Talent and Hiring Effort

In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”

To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.

NASA Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”

So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the program across a different facilities.

“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a manager at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta