Approximately a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as F1's latest participant for 2026. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and has a amused expression when considering the ride.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the impending decisive point in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he felt 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. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the correct procedures on the track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now at over 400 and planned to attain the target of 600 quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to produce the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager talks to a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
