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 F1's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be held in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at more than 400 and planned to attain the goal of 600 members quickly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to produce the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the program at a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that leader consults a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
