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A little more than one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the go-ahead as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Establishing the organization from nothing has required a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the last event of the season to be held in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.

The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.

“You might get a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the owner, GM, into Formula One.

“Building an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”

With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.

“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Push

In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.

“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to produce the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.

Space Mission Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the project across a different facilities.

“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”

The Future

The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta