Just over one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as F1's latest participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a wry smile when considering the ride.
“You might get a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now up to more than 400 and intended to attain the objective of 600 members quickly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on distinct elements of the project across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor talks to a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
