Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the America, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are sharper on the looming decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the circuit. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now up to more than 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling different aspects of the mission in a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they escalate it to their manager, that manager consults a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
