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A little more than twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's newest participant for 2026. Constructing the organization from the ground up has required a intense work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the last event of the championship to be held in the US, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be adequate time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a knowing grin when considering the experience.

“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Challenge

The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.

“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”

With each day that goes by focus are sharper on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.

“One must presume that any new team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.

“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the race track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression from there on.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive

In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”

To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now up to more than 400 and scheduled to reach the target of six hundred quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.

Apollo Blueprint

“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the program at a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that manager consults a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Eliminating management approval for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”

Upcoming Challenges

The efficacy of this agile methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta