A little more than twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as F1's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the America, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a amused expression when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the circuit. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 swiftly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the team are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to produce the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, different from the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor consults a manager in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “So we empower staff to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
