🔗 Share this article

Just over a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for 2026. Establishing the squad from scratch has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.

The Tight Timeline to Melbourne

At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.

“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”

A Unique Task

The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.

“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”

With each day that passes thoughts are sharper on the looming critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while Chester echoed this he felt the team had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the race track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement from there on.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Push

In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.

“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”

To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the team are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.

NASA Blueprint

“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the program across a variety of locations.

“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that leader talks to a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for each action is much smoother and quicker.”

The Future

The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta