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Just over twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the official approval as the world of Formula One's most recent entry for 2026. Establishing the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.

The Tight Timeline to Melbourne

At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.

“You can have a short period looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”

An Unprecedented Task

The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.

“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the chance to change cultural approach.”

With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being managed.

“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 accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO shared this view he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.

“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”

Pilot Selection and Team Building Push

In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.

“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”

To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now reaching over 400 and intended to attain the goal of six hundred quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.

NASA Model

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling various components of the project at a different facilities.

“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”

The Future

The success of this flexible strategy will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta