A little more than a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as F1's latest participant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has involved a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the America, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and gets a amused expression when considering the journey.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes thoughts are sharper on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this setup, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program in a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a protocol where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager consults a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
