A little more than one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and has a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender doing the right things on the race track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, contrary to the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the program across a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
