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A little more than one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as F1's newest entry for 2026. Constructing the squad from nothing has required a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the final race of the season to be held in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season 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 enough hours in the day.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and gets a amused expression when thinking about the ride.

“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Establishing an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you won't have the chance to transform organizational mindset.”

With every day that passes minds are more focused on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.

“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the team had a point to prove as well.

“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show improvement after that.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive

In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be 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 we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”

To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the process of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.

Space Mission Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the program at a variety of locations.

“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor consults a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”

Upcoming Challenges

The effectiveness of this agile approach will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta