Just over twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Establishing the squad from the ground up has required a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the season to be staged in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each day that elapses focus are sharper on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with staff now up to more than 400 and intended to hit the objective of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the mission across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
