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Approximately twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the go-ahead as F1's latest entrant for 2026. Constructing the team from the ground up has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a amused expression when considering the journey.

“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

The CTO had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.

“Building an Formula One 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 chance to alter team culture.”

With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that we are a serious contender doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort

In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now at more than 400 and planned to reach the objective of six hundred quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.

NASA Blueprint

“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”

So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all working on various components of the mission at a multiple sites.

“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that manager communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”

The Future

The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta