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Approximately a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the America, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.

“You might get a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.

“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change organizational mindset.”

With each passing day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in Australia and targets are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team 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 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 belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort

In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the 2029 engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, contrary to the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.

NASA Model

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on distinct elements of the mission in a different facilities.

“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Avoiding management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”

What Lies Ahead

The efficacy of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta