A little more than a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as F1's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has required a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race 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 come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to change team culture.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Australia and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now reaching over 400 and planned to attain the goal of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon ahead of the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the program in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
