A little more than a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“You can have a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the impending critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the race track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor consults a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
