Just over twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from nothing has required a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and intended to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the mission at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
