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Approximately a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entry for 2026. Constructing the organization from the ground up has required a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the final race of the season to be held in the America, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a amused expression when considering the ride.

“You might get a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”

A Unique Task

Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to alter cultural approach.”

With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and targets are being set realistically.

“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort

In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.

“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.

NASA Blueprint

“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the project across a different facilities.

“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta