A little more than one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the green light as Formula One’s latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from scratch has involved a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center since then and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are more focused on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume 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 earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now at over 400 and planned to reach the target of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the center to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, 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 non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
