Just over a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as F1's latest entrant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has entailed a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the United States, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and gets a amused expression when considering the journey.
“You might get a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the program at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that leader talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
