🔗 Share this article

A little more than twelve months previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the green light as Formula One’s newest entrant for 2026. Establishing the organization from the ground up has involved a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.

The Tight Timeline to Australia

At the season finale of the season to be staged in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project 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 knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.

“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to change team culture.”

With each day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.

“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”

Racing Talent and Hiring Drive

In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, different from the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.

Apollo Model

“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”

So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the project across a different facilities.

“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that manager consults a leader in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta