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Approximately one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the last event of the championship to be held in the United States, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when considering the ride.

“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”

A Unique Opportunity

The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has truly matched the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Building an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”

With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.

“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the team had a statement to make as well.

“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort

In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”

To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the process of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex structure, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.

Space Mission Model

“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”

So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project across a different facilities.

“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”

The Future

The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta