A little more than twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be held in the America, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all working on various components of the program at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that manager consults a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins 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
