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A little more than a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has involved a intense operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the United States, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.

“You can have a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity

Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to transform team culture.”

With each day that elapses focus are more focused on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.

“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.

“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”

Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive

In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of combative optimism.

“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 members quickly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to produce the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, contrary to the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.

Space Mission Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling various components of the program at a variety of locations.

“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that manager consults a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “So we empower people to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”

The Future

The success of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta