Approximately twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from nothing has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be held in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With each day that goes by focus are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with staff now at in excess of 400 and planned to attain the target of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling different aspects of the mission in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader talks to a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The success of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
