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Approximately a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the green light as F1's newest participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the final race of the season to be held in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.

“There might be a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to transform team culture.”

With each passing day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.

“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.

“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” 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 circuit. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”

Pilot Selection and Hiring Push

In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of combative optimism.

“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”

To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.

Space Mission Blueprint

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the mission in a variety of locations.

“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for each action is much smoother and faster.”

The Future

The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta