A little more than a full year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are more focused on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and planned to reach the objective of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the mission at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a leader in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile approach will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
