A little more than one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the green light as F1's latest entrant for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the United States, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“There might be a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the looming decisive point in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the race track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with employees now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to attain the target of 600 quickly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the team are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on distinct elements of the mission in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
