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A little more than one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as F1's most recent entry for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.

The Countdown to Australia

At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.

“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity

Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to change cultural approach.”

With each day that passes minds are more focused on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the track. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”

Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push

In August they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”

To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching over 400 and intended to hit the target of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of building an main base at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, contrary to the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.

Apollo Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”

So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the mission in a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”

Upcoming Challenges

The success of this flexible methodology will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta