Approximately one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the go-ahead as F1's newest entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be staged in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses minds are more focused on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the race track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at over 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of 600 swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the center to build the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the program in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a manager in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
