Just over one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from nothing has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be held in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a knowing grin when considering the ride.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you won't have the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the track. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Drive
In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in operating 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 have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the target of six hundred quickly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to build the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all working on different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that leader consults a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
