A little more than twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as the world of Formula One's latest participant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Vegas this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to over 400 and intended to reach the objective of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of completing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, different from the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal just before the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the program at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
