A little more than twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as Formula One’s newest participant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be held in the United States, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, 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 the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the program at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
