Approximately a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from the ground up has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a amused expression when considering the experience.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to alter team culture.”
With each day that elapses focus are sharper on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the race track. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the mission at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that manager talks to a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
