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A little more than a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as Formula One’s latest participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.

The Tight Timeline to Melbourne

At the last event of the season to be hosted in the United States, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.

“You can have a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, GM, into F1.

“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you won't have the chance to transform team culture.”

With each passing day that passes focus are sharper on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the team had a point to prove as well.

“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”

Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push

In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.

“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”

To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and intended to attain the objective of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.

NASA Model

“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the project across a variety of locations.

“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and faster.”

The Future

The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta