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A little more than a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as F1's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.

The Tight Timeline to Australia

At the final race of the season to be held in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.

“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.

“Building an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to change team culture.”

With each day that elapses minds are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being set realistically.

“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.

“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive

In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of fighting spirit.

“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”

To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to over 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.

Apollo Inspiration

“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. 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 comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project in a variety of locations.

“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor consults a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”

The Future

The success of this flexible methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta