Just over one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the go-ahead as F1's newest participant for 2026. Establishing the organization from the ground up has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and has a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses focus are more focused on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, 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 our goal isn't to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and planned to hit the objective of six hundred quickly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the project across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
