A little more than twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the official approval as F1's latest participant for 2026. Constructing the team from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the season to be held in the America, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to alter cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the looming decisive point in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the race track. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and intended to reach the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the center to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal just before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
