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Just over one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the green light as F1's most recent entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has involved a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the final race of the season to be hosted in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the ride.

“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”

A Unique Task

Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.

“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you won't have the chance to transform organizational mindset.”

With each day that goes by minds are sharper on the looming moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being handled.

“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”

Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort

In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the attitude of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching over 400 and planned to reach the objective of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to produce the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.

NASA Model

“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the project in a different facilities.

“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and faster.”

Upcoming Challenges

The effectiveness of this agile approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta