Just over twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Establishing the organization from the ground up has involved a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and gets a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“There might be a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the task of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the parent company, GM, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now up to over 400 and planned to attain the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the center to produce the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the project across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their manager, that leader talks to a supervisor in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
