Approximately twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Building the organization from nothing has required a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With each day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at over 400 and planned to attain the objective of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the organization are in the process of finishing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, contrary to the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their manager, that manager talks to a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Avoiding management approval for each action is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile approach will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
