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Just over one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has required a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the final race of the season to be held in the US, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.

“You can have a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.

“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”

With each day that goes by focus are more focused on the approaching critical moment in Australia and expectations are being managed.

“One must presume that any new team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.

“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the circuit. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”

Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push

In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.

“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”

To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now up to more than 400 and planned to attain the target of 600 rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to build the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.

NASA Model

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program at a multiple sites.

“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”

What Lies Ahead

The success of this agile methodology will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta