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Just over a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from the ground up has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the final race of the season to be held in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a knowing grin when considering the ride.

“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Task

Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.

“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the chance to transform team culture.”

With each day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.

“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the race track. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show progression from there on.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort

In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view with this structure, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”

To that end hiring has been in full swing, with employees now reaching more than 400 and planned to attain the objective of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, contrary to the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.

Apollo Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”

So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they raise it up to their manager, that manager talks to a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”

Upcoming Challenges

The success of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta