Just over twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as Formula One’s newest entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has required a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are more focused on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect 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,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 swiftly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the team are in the process of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said the team principal just before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
