Approximately one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest participant for 2026. Establishing the team from scratch has involved a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be held in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and enjoys a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious seasons of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Australia and goals are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender doing the right things on the race track. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of 600 swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the project in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that manager talks to a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
