Just over a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a intense work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be held in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the chance to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO shared this view he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the circuit. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with staff now at over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling various components of the mission in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager consults a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
