A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's newest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has entailed a intense work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be held in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses minds are more focused on the looming critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 rapidly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal just before the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the mission in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a manager at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The success of this nimble approach will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
