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Approximately one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest entry for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has entailed a hectic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the America, with just over 100 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 never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a amused expression when considering the ride.

“You can have a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors, into F1.

“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to transform cultural approach.”

With every day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”

Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive

In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.

“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”

To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now at over 400 and intended to hit the target of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.

Apollo Model

“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”

So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling different aspects of the mission in a variety of locations.

“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for everything is much smoother and faster.”

What Lies Ahead

The efficacy of this agile methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta