A little more than one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from scratch has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the America, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when considering the experience.
“There might be a short period looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
The CTO had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any new team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester shared this view he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now at over 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a leader at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The success of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
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