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A little more than one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Establishing the squad from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.

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 take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.

The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.

“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”

An Unprecedented Task

Chester had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to alter team culture.”

With each passing day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.

“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 feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.

“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the track. After we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement from there on.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive

In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.

“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”

To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members quickly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.

Space Mission Model

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” stated the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission in a variety of locations.

“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”

Upcoming Challenges

The efficacy of this agile approach will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta