Just over a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for 2026. Establishing the squad from scratch has entailed a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and has a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching more than 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said the team principal just before the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that leader talks to a leader in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this flexible strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
