Just over one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has required a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center since then and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now reaching over 400 and planned to reach the goal of 600 swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the center to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on various components of the project across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that leader consults a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
