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A little more than a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the green light as F1's latest entrant for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has required a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.

The Tight Timeline to Melbourne

At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.

“You might get a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Challenge

Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.

“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the chance to transform cultural approach.”

With each day that elapses focus are more focused on the impending decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Chester echoed this he thought the team had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”

Racing Talent and Team Building Effort

In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of fighting spirit.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now up to more than 400 and scheduled to attain the target of 600 rapidly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of building an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to produce the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.

Space Mission Model

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on different aspects of the mission across a variety of locations.

“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”

Upcoming Challenges

The success of this agile strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta