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Just over twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from scratch has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.

The Tight Timeline to Australia

At the final race of the championship to be staged in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.

“You might get a short period looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”

An Unprecedented Task

Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.

“Building an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”

With every day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.

“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.

“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression after that.”

Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort

In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a mountain 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 finish last. I believe with this structure, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”

To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to attain the goal of 600 swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.

NASA Blueprint

“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”

So they have adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the mission in a different facilities.

“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Moving away from management approval for everything is much smoother and faster.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta