A little more than one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has required a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, 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 won't have the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each day that passes thoughts are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the mission across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a protocol where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
