Approximately twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted 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 come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when considering the experience.
“There might be a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the front 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.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and planned to reach the target of six hundred quickly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon just before the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission in a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader consults a manager in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
