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Just over one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as the world of Formula One's most recent entry for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.

The Countdown to Australia

At the last event of the championship to be held in the US, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a wry smile when considering the journey.

“You can have a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Task

Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into F1.

“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you won't have the possibility to transform team culture.”

With each day that passes focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.

“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.

“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Push

In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of fighting spirit.

“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To that end hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, contrary to the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.

Space Mission Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon ahead of the British GP in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the program across a variety of locations.

“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a manager in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and quicker.”

What Lies Ahead

The success of this flexible strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season 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 American Colton Herta