Approximately one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Building the team from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the America, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the attitude of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to build the new engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on different aspects of the project across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that supervisor consults a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
