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Approximately twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entry for 2026. Constructing the team from nothing has involved a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.

The Tight Timeline to Melbourne

At the final race of the championship to be held in the America, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.

“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.

“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to change cultural approach.”

With every day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.

“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 accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender executing the proper actions on the race track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”

Pilot Selection and Team Building Push

In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of fighting spirit.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”

To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now up to over 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 rapidly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.

NASA Blueprint

“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission at a different facilities.

“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and faster.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta