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Approximately a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has required a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the season finale of the championship to be held in the US, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.

“You might get a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”

A Unique Task

Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.

“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to alter team culture.”

With each passing day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.

“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while Chester echoed this he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.

“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the race track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”

Pilot Selection and Team Building Push

In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of fighting spirit.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”

To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the target of six hundred quickly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.

Apollo Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”

So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on distinct elements of the program across a multiple sites.

“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta