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Approximately a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.

The Tight Timeline to Australia

At the final race of the season to be staged in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the ride.

“You can have a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.

“Building an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”

With each passing day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being handled.

“You have to assume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the team had a statement to make as well.

“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”

Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort

In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the mood of fighting spirit.

“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”

To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and intended to hit the goal of six hundred quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.

NASA Model

“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal ahead of the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the program in a variety of locations.

“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that leader communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to take charge. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta