A little more than twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the green light as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has required a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the US, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix 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 chance to change team culture.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching over 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 members quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, contrary to the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” stated the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the mission across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader talks to a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
