A little more than a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from scratch has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to change team culture.”
With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, 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 that end hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to attain the objective of 600 members quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to produce the new engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the mission in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that leader talks to a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
