A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the official approval as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has required a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender doing the proper actions on the circuit. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression from there on.”
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and planned to reach the target of 600 swiftly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of building an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organization, contrary to the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the mission at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The success of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
Maya Chen is a seasoned tech journalist and software developer with over a decade of experience in digital innovation and cybersecurity.
