Just over a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as Formula One’s newest participant for 2026. Establishing the organization from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the America, with just over a hundred days 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 never-ending task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that passes focus are more focused on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while Chester shared this view he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now reaching over 400 and intended to reach the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the team are in the phase of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the program in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
