A little more than twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the official approval as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Establishing the organization from scratch has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the season to be staged in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the journey.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and planned to reach the goal of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to produce the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on various components of the project across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that manager talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower people to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
