Just over twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from scratch has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be held in the US, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the correct procedures on the track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all working on various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader consults a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
