Approximately twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from nothing has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 quickly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the power unit, set for the 2029 season – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all tackling various components of the mission across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager consults a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower staff to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
