Just over twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from the ground up has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the America, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are sharper on the approaching critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team 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 thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with employees now up to over 400 and intended to hit the objective of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader talks to a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
