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Just over twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s latest entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has required a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.

The Tight Timeline to Australia

At the season finale of the season to be staged in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.

“You might get a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”

A Unique Task

The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Building an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to alter cultural approach.”

With each day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.

“You have to assume that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”

Pilot Selection and Hiring Push

In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.

“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”

To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and intended to reach the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.

NASA Blueprint

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”

So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the mission at a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager consults a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”

Upcoming Challenges

The efficacy of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta