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A little more than twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the official approval as Formula One’s newest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the final race of the championship to be staged in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the journey.

“There might be a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”

A Unique Opportunity

The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the owner, GM, into Formula One.

“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”

With each day that goes by focus are sharper on the approaching decisive point in Australia and targets 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 commented this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the team had a statement to make as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression after that.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Push

In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the attitude of fighting spirit.

“Of course, we’re realistic,” 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 stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now up to more than 400 and planned to attain the target of 600 rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.

NASA Model

“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”

So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the program across a different facilities.

“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”

Upcoming Challenges

The efficacy of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta