Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Building the organization from nothing has involved a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event 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 first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In August they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the mood of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now reaching over 400 and planned to attain the goal of 600 rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that manager communicates with a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
