A little more than one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as Formula One’s newest entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on distinct elements of the program in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that manager consults a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Moving away from management approval for each action is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
