Approximately a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as F1's latest participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the race track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
