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A little more than a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has required a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.

The Tight Timeline to Melbourne

At the final race of the campaign to be held in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.

“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Building an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to alter cultural approach.”

With each day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and goals are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”

Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive

In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the mood of determined optimism.

“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate structure, different from the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.

NASA Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. 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 non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling distinct elements of the program in a variety of locations.

“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for each action is much smoother and quicker.”

The Future

The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta