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Approximately one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has entailed a intense work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the United States, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.

“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

The CTO had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”

With each day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal commented earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.

“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing the correct procedures on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”

Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive

In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of fighting spirit.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”

To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.

NASA Blueprint

“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal just before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have implemented, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a variety of locations.

“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”

What Lies Ahead

The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta