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Just over a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the last event of the campaign to be held in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a knowing grin when considering the experience.

“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the owner, GM, into Formula One.

“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the chance to change team culture.”

With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.

“You have to assume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this 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,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the circuit. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on progression after that.”

Driver Lineup and Recruitment Drive

In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.

“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”

To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred quickly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.

Apollo Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the project at a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”

The Future

The success of this nimble methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta