Approximately twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the go-ahead as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Constructing the squad from nothing has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be held in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the track. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of 600 members quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the trend in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
