A little more than twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a amused expression when considering the ride.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are more focused on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now at over 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough 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 implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the program at a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
