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Approximately twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from nothing has required a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the final race of the season to be staged in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.

“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”

A Unique Task

Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the owner, General Motors, into F1.

“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to transform team culture.”

With every day that passes thoughts are more focused on the approaching critical moment in Australia and targets are being managed.

“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.

“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”

Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive

In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the attitude of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”

To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex structure, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.

NASA Model

“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”

So they have embraced, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission in a different facilities.

“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a manager in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to take charge. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”

The Future

The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the young American Colton Herta