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A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the green light as Formula One’s newest participant for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.

The Tight Timeline to Australia

At the final race of the championship to be staged in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.

“There might be a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the parent company, GM, into F1.

“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to alter cultural approach.”

With each day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.

“You have to assume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while Chester shared this view he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.

“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement after that.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Push

In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.

“Of course, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”

To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now up to over 400 and planned to reach the objective of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the team are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the new engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.

Apollo Model

“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal ahead of the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”

So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the program across a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor consults a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”

The Future

The success of this nimble approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta