Just over one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from scratch has involved a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the United States, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to change team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender doing the proper actions on the race track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at in excess of 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the program at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Eliminating management approval for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
