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A little more than a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest entry for 2026. Building the team from nothing has involved a intense work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the final race of the championship to be staged in the America, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.

“You might get five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

A Unique Opportunity

Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors, into Formula One.

“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to alter team culture.”

With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and goals are being managed.

“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.

“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we show 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 have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”

Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push

In August they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”

To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching over 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.

Apollo Model

“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the program across a multiple sites.

“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor consults a leader in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for everything is much smoother and faster.”

What Lies Ahead

The success of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta