Just over a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as Formula One’s latest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from the ground up has required a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “In order that we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and planned to hit the goal of 600 quickly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” stated the team principal ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the mission at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that manager consults a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile approach will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
