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 most recent entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from scratch has required a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, 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 heart ever since and gets a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the race track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the project across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their manager, that leader consults a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this agile approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
