Approximately twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Building the squad from the ground up has required a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they make their debut 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 challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated recently and while Chester echoed this he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching over 400 and intended to attain the target of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the project across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor consults a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
