A little more than twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the go-ahead as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from nothing has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender doing the right things on the race track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now up to over 400 and intended to hit the objective of 600 swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all tackling various components of the program across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
