Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the US, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the circuit. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now up to over 400 and planned to attain the target of 600 rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, contrary to the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal just before the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on various components of the project across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that supervisor consults a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
