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Just over twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Building the team from nothing has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the America, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the ride.

“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”

A Unique Challenge

The CTO had success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.

“Building an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to change team culture.”

With every day that passes thoughts are more focused on the looming critical moment in Australia and expectations are being managed.

“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.

“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”

Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive

In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view with this structure, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”

To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now up to more than 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.

NASA Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project in a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”

What Lies Ahead

The success of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta