A little more than twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from scratch has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the US, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and has a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view with this setup, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and intended to attain the target of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the center to build the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the trend in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that leader talks to a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
