A little more than a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest participant for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time 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 hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and has a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that passes minds are sharper on the looming decisive point in Australia and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the track. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now at over 400 and intended to attain the goal of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to produce the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the program across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the young American Colton Herta