Approximately one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for 2026. Building the team from nothing has involved a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the America, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart since then and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now reaching more than 400 and intended to reach the target of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, contrary to the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all working on various components of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
