Approximately a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the green light as Formula One’s newest entry for 2026. Establishing the squad from nothing has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Vegas this race 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 United States, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are sharper on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and planned to attain the target of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the center to produce the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
Space Mission Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the project in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
