A little more than a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from nothing has entailed a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the US, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to transform team culture.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to hit the objective of 600 quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the center to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the direction in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling various components of the program at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader consults a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this nimble methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
