Just over one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from scratch has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the US, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the process of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the center to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling various components of the project across a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
