A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has required a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be staged in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a amused expression when considering the ride.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
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 incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now up to more than 400 and intended to attain the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on distinct elements of the project in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager consults a leader in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
