Just over twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as the world of Formula One's newest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the chance to alter team culture.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face 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 finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling various components of the mission in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this agile approach will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
