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Just over a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the go-ahead as F1's most recent entry for 2026. Constructing the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the season finale of the season to be held in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.

“There might be a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.

“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”

With each passing day that passes focus are sharper on the impending moment of truth in Australia and goals are being handled.

“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”

Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive

In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.

“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”

To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching more than 400 and planned to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.

Space Mission Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”

So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the project across a variety of locations.

“In a system where you follow a protocol where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”

Upcoming Challenges

The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta