Approximately twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has involved a intense work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the US, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by minds are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “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. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their manager, that leader communicates with a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
