Just over a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for 2026. Establishing the squad from the ground up has required a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to alter team culture.”
With each day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now reaching more than 400 and planned to reach the target of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, contrary to the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the mission across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader consults a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The success of this nimble strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
