A little more than one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest participant for 2026. Establishing the organization from scratch has involved a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when considering the experience.
“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes focus are more focused on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” 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 we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, 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 top gear, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the mission 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 supervisor consults a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to people to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be evaluated 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 signed as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
