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Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the America, with approximately 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the ride.

“You can have five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Challenge

The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's victorious seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.

“Establishing an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to transform cultural approach.”

With each day that passes thoughts are more focused on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the circuit. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”

Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive

In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.

“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”

To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now up to more than 400 and planned to reach the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.

Apollo Model

“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.

“If you have to go through a protocol where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for everything is much smoother and quicker.”

Upcoming Challenges

The efficacy of this agile approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta