A little more than one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as F1's newest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has entailed a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be held in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to produce the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the project in a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that supervisor consults a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this flexible methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
