A little more than twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from nothing has required a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the United States, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the chance to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are sharper on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on progression from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In August they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now reaching over 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to produce the new engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal just before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the program in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
