Approximately a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Establishing the organization from nothing has entailed a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the US, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a amused expression when considering the journey.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the impending decisive point in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now up to more than 400 and scheduled to reach the target of six hundred quickly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal ahead of the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the program across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that leader talks to a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
