Approximately one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be held in the United States, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes focus are more focused on the approaching critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this setup, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 swiftly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the team are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, different from the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on distinct elements of the program in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
