Just over one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from scratch has entailed a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be held in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes thoughts are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be 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 believe with this structure, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now up to over 400 and planned to attain the goal of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that supervisor consults a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
