A little more than one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as Formula One’s newest participant for 2026. Constructing the organization from scratch has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race 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 United States, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“You might get a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this setup, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on various components of the program in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
