A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the America, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a amused expression when considering the ride.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching over 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the process of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the direction in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated the team principal just before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the mission at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader consults a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
