Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the go-ahead as F1's newest entrant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has involved a intense work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be held in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that elapses focus are sharper on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the circuit. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now at more than 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 quickly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of completing an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all tackling different aspects of the program in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this nimble approach will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
