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A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from the ground up has entailed a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with around three months to go before they make their debut 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 sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.

“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”

A Unique Challenge

Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to change team culture.”

With every day that passes focus are sharper on the impending critical moment in Australia and expectations are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the race track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive

In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of fighting spirit.

“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”

To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now at in excess of 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 members swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred to.

NASA Blueprint

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said the team principal shortly before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, 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 non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.

“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to people to take charge. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”

Upcoming Challenges

The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta