A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the official approval as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Establishing the team from scratch has involved a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to transform team culture.”
With each day that passes minds are sharper on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the circuit. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now at in excess of 400 and planned to attain the target of 600 quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of completing an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal just before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the project at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is much smoother and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
