Just over twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center since then and has a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are sharper on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that we are a serious contender doing the proper actions on the race track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 quickly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the project at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader consults a supervisor in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
