Approximately twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as the world of Formula One's newest entry for 2026. Building the organization from scratch has required a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the season to be hosted in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the track. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now up to more than 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the process of building an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the center to produce the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager consults a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
