Just over twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as the world of Formula One's newest participant for 2026. Establishing the squad from scratch has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be staged in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now up to over 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 members quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
