A little more than a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as F1's latest entry for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be held in the US, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender doing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 quickly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the project across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that leader talks to a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
