A little more than a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the official approval as F1's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from nothing has required a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by minds are sharper on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching over 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader consults a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
