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Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.

The Tight Timeline to Australia

At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the America, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.

“You can have five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity

Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.

“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”

With every day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Australia and targets are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.

“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender doing the proper actions on the track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”

Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort

In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching over 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the process of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.

NASA Blueprint

“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the mission in a variety of locations.

“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that leader consults a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”

Upcoming Challenges

The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta