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A little more than one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from nothing has entailed a intense work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.

The Countdown to Australia

At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the America, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the ride.

“There might be five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.

“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”

With every day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.

“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”

Racing Talent and Hiring Drive

In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.

“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”

To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 quickly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.

NASA Model

“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon just before the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on various components of the project at a different facilities.

“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that leader consults a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”

Upcoming Challenges

The success of this flexible methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta