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A little more than one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Constructing the squad from scratch has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.

The Tight Timeline to Melbourne

At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the America, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.

The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and has a wry smile when considering the ride.

“You can have five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.

“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”

With each day that elapses minds are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Melbourne and goals are being handled.

“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.

“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression after that.”

Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive

In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”

To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the team are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.

NASA Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on various components of the program at a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader talks to a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”

Upcoming Challenges

The efficacy of this agile approach 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. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta