🔗 Share this article

Approximately twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entry for 2026. Constructing the team from the ground up has involved a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.

The Tight Timeline to Australia

At the last event of the championship to be staged in the America, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and has a knowing grin when considering the journey.

“There might be five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the parent company, GM, into F1.

“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”

With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.

“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO shared this view he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement after that.”

Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive

In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”

To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of building an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.

NASA Model

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated the team principal ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that leader consults a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”

Upcoming Challenges

The success of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta