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Just over one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for 2026. Constructing the squad from nothing has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Australia

At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic project in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.

“There might be a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Challenge

Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.

“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to change team culture.”

With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.

“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the organization had a point to prove 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 want to show that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Push

In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.

“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now at more than 400 and scheduled to attain the target of 600 swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the power unit, set for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.

Apollo Inspiration

“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the program across a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a manager in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and faster.”

Upcoming Challenges

The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta