A little more than twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from the ground up has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be held in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and intended to attain the objective of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the program across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
