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A little more than one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as F1's newest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the last event of the campaign to be held in the United States, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.

“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Challenge

The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, GM, into F1.

“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”

With each passing day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.

“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.

“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression subsequently.”

Racing Talent and Team Building Push

In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”

To that end hiring has been in top gear, with employees now up to more than 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.

Apollo Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project across a multiple sites.

“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that manager talks to a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”

Upcoming Challenges

The efficacy of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta