A little more than one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as F1's most recent entry for 2026. Constructing the squad from scratch has required a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and gets a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are more focused on the looming critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now reaching more than 400 and intended to reach the target of six hundred quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all tackling various components of the mission in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager consults a leader at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
