A little more than twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Constructing the organization from scratch has involved a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the circuit. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and intended to hit the objective of 600 members quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a leader in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
