A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the go-ahead as F1's newest entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the America, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and gets a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“There might be a brief moment looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you won't have the chance to change cultural approach.”
With every day that passes focus are more focused on the impending decisive point in Australia and goals are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the circuit. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 quickly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the process of completing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the mission across a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “So we empower people to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta