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A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the official approval as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the United States, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the experience.

“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”

A Unique Opportunity

Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.

“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to change team culture.”

With every day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.

“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “In order that we show up and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the proper actions on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”

Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive

In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”

To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of finishing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, different from the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred to.

Space Mission Model

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on various components of the project in a multiple sites.

“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a leader in another department, it travels back down, 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 more rapid.”

The Future

The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta