A little more than twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the US, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then 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 the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are sharper on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the circuit. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the project at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that leader talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
