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Approximately a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the America, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and has a amused expression when considering the journey.

“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Challenge

Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.

“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”

With every day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the looming moment of truth in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while Chester echoed this he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement from there on.”

Racing Talent and Hiring Effort

In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”

To that end hiring has been in full swing, with employees now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, at odds with the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.

NASA Blueprint

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the project at a different facilities.

“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that manager consults a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”

The Future

The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta