Just over one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Building the organization from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Vegas this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the circuit. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with employees now at in excess of 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the mission at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor consults a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
