Approximately twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the go-ahead as F1's latest participant for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has entailed a intense work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that passes thoughts are more focused on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now at in excess of 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 rapidly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of finishing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader communicates with a supervisor in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “So we empower staff to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
The success of this nimble strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
Eva de Vries is a passionate book lover and local writer from Eindhoven.
