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Approximately a full year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from the ground up has required a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.

The Tight Timeline to Melbourne

At the season finale of the season to be held in the United States, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.

“You might get a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.

“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”

With each passing day that passes thoughts are sharper on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.

“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement subsequently.”

Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort

In August they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the team are in the process of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.

Space Mission Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the mission at a multiple sites.

“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that supervisor consults a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”

The Future

The efficacy of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta