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Approximately twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Constructing the squad from scratch has involved a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the final race of the campaign to be held in the America, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the ride.

“You might get five minutes thinking 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: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.

“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you won't have the opportunity to alter team culture.”

With every day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.

“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”

Racing Talent and Hiring Drive

In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”

To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching more than 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to build the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.

Space Mission Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”

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

“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a leader in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”

The Future

The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta