A little more than a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entry for 2026. Building the organization from the ground up has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO enjoyed 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 quite compared with the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from nothing, 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 possibility to change team culture.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Australia and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender doing the right things on the track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager consults a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this nimble methodology will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
