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A little more than one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the America, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, 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 sufficient time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a wry smile when considering the experience.

“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity

The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.

“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to transform team culture.”

With each passing day that passes minds are more focused on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.

“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented this year and while Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Push

In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.

“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”

To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at over 400 and intended to reach the goal of 600 swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the center to produce the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.

Space Mission Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the program in a different facilities.

“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”

Upcoming Challenges

The success of this nimble approach will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta