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Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entry for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has involved a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the America, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent 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 core since then and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.

“You might get a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Task

Nick Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.

“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to transform cultural approach.”

With each day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive

In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.

“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”

To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with employees now reaching more than 400 and intended to hit the target of 600 rapidly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.

Apollo Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”

So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the project in a variety of locations.

“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that manager consults a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”

Upcoming Challenges

The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta