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Just over twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has involved a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.

“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the owner, GM, into F1.

“Building an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you won't have the chance to alter team culture.”

With each passing day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.

“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.

“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement after that.”

Driver Lineup and Recruitment Effort

In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the mood of fighting spirit.

“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”

To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now up to more than 400 and planned to hit the target of 600 quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the power unit, set for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.

Apollo Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have adopted, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the project across a multiple sites.

“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”

Upcoming Challenges

The efficacy of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta