A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as Formula One’s newest entrant for 2026. Establishing the squad from scratch has involved a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event 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 Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center since then and gets a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to change team culture.”
With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, different from the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the mission at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
