A little more than a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for 2026. Building the team from nothing has involved a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging 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 implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a manager in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
