Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's most recent participant for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the America, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“There might be a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented recently 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 deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with staff now reaching over 400 and planned to attain the target of 600 rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the process of completing an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the mission across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile approach will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
