🔗 Share this article

Approximately one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has entailed a intense work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the America, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac 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 CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and has a knowing grin when considering the ride.

“There might be a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

The CTO had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Building an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”

With every day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while Chester echoed this he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.

“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender doing the proper actions on the circuit. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort

In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”

To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the process of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.

Space Mission Model

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.

“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager consults a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for everything is much smoother and faster.”

Upcoming Challenges

The success of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta