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A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.

The Countdown to Australia

At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.

“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.

“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to change team culture.”

With every day that elapses focus are more focused on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.

“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while Chester echoed this he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort

In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of combative optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”

To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching over 400 and intended to hit the target of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the team are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.

NASA Inspiration

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”

So they have implemented, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all working on various components of the program across a different facilities.

“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and quicker.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta