A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for 2026. Establishing the organization from the ground up has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a amused expression when considering the journey.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are more focused on the approaching critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and planned to reach the target of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
Apollo Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the program in a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that manager talks to a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
