Approximately one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as F1's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the US, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each day that passes minds are more focused on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the race track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Push
In August they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the target of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the program at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that leader talks to a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile strategy 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 development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
