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A little more than twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the go-ahead as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has involved a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Australia

At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the America, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a wry smile when considering the journey.

“You can have a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”

A Unique Challenge

The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.

“Building an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”

With each day that elapses minds are sharper on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.

“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.

“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort

In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.

“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”

To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 members quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the process of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.

NASA Blueprint

“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project across a multiple sites.

“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that manager communicates with a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta