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A little more than one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's latest participant for 2026. Building the team from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the last event of the season to be held in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the journey.

“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”

A Unique Opportunity

Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.

“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to transform team culture.”

With each passing day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.

“You have to assume that any new team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.

“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”

Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort

In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.

“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”

To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now reaching over 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the center to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.

NASA Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon just before the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the mission in a different facilities.

“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager talks to a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”

What Lies Ahead

The efficacy of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta