Approximately one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from scratch has required a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be staged in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and has a amused expression when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view with this setup, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at more than 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the mission in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
