A little more than twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from the ground up has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne 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 not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to change cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by focus are more focused on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal just before the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the mission in 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 leader talks to a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for each action is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
