Approximately a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the America, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching over 400 and intended to reach the objective of six hundred quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the process of completing an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal just before the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all working on different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager consults a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is much smoother and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
