Just over a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the go-ahead as F1's most recent entry for 2026. Establishing the organization from the ground up has involved a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be held in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes minds are more focused on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this setup, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now reaching over 400 and intended to reach the target of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, different from the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the program at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a manager in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
