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Just over a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for 2026. Building the team from nothing has involved a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the final race of the championship to be held in the US, with around three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.

“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

Nick Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.

“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to change cultural approach.”

With each day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.

“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression from there on.”

Racing Talent and Hiring Effort

In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”

To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with employees now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are constructing the center to build the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the direction in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.

Apollo Inspiration

“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”

So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on different aspects of the program at a variety of locations.

“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and faster.”

The Future

The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta