A little more than one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from the ground up has entailed a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the US, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In August they recruited 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 of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 members quickly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “So we empower staff to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
