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Just over twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the go-ahead as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.

The Tight Timeline to Melbourne

At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the journey.

“You might get a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Challenge

Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.

“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”

With each passing day that goes by minds are sharper on the looming critical moment in Australia and targets are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the team had a statement to make as well.

“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort

In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the attitude of fighting spirit.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to over 400 and planned to reach the goal of six hundred quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.

NASA Inspiration

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said the team principal just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know 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 embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the project in a variety of locations.

“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a supervisor in another department, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”

The Future

The success of this flexible approach will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta