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Just over twelve months previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as Formula One’s latest participant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has involved a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the final race of the championship to be held in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will not be adequate time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a knowing grin when considering the ride.

“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has truly matched the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, GM, into F1.

“Creating an F1 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 chance to change organizational mindset.”

With each day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.

“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender doing the proper actions on the track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”

Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort

In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of six hundred quickly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.

Space Mission Blueprint

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal just before the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on various components of the program at a different facilities.

“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor consults a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”

Upcoming Challenges

The success of this agile approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta