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Approximately a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as F1's newest participant for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has required a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.

The Tight Timeline to Australia

At the final race of the season to be staged in the US, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a amused expression when considering the ride.

“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”

A Unique Task

Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”

With each passing day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while Chester shared this view he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement after that.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive

In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the attitude of fighting spirit.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”

To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now at over 400 and planned to reach the objective of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.

Apollo Model

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the program at a multiple sites.

“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a manager in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and quicker.”

The Future

The efficacy of this agile approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta