Just over one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from scratch has required a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the US, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that passes focus are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of six hundred quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the new engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon ahead of the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on various components of the mission across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
