Just over one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from nothing has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with employees now up to more than 400 and intended to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the team are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the center to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all working on different aspects of the project at a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a manager in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
