A little more than twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the official approval as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the America, with approximately 100 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 monumental challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now up to over 400 and intended to hit the objective of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the project at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Moving away from management approval for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
