A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from scratch has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that passes thoughts are sharper on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the track. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in operating 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.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view with this setup, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to over 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, contrary to the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said the team principal just before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the project across a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
