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Just over one year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last given the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.

The Countdown to Australia

At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and has a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.

“You can have five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Challenge

The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.

“Establishing an F1 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 rarely get the chance to change cultural approach.”

With each passing day that elapses focus are sharper on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.

“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the track. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”

Pilot Selection and Recruitment Effort

In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the attitude of combative optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now up to over 400 and planned to reach the goal of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of building an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to produce the power unit, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.

NASA Inspiration

“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the mission in a different facilities.

“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a manager in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for everything is much smoother and faster.”

The Future

The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta